Martin Bramah: ‘Being in The Fall is a life sentence. Why not embrace it and have fun?’

In a Manchester pub masked by scaffolding, Paul Hanley, the former Fall drummer, is banging out rhythms on a table as he explains how two drummers can play together. His brother Steve, who played bass in the band, is sitting next to him. Across from them is Martin Bramah, one of The Fall’s founders. With that second drummer, Simon Wolstencroft, and the guitarist Pete Greenway they make up House of All, who describe themselves as a “Fall family continuum”: all five were key members of the band driven and domineered by the eccentric cultural autocrat Mark E Smith, who died in 2018.

Some were kicked out, some left, and one returned only then to be kicked out: these men are a rich seam, sometimes cast as survivors of a band that was often cast as a cult. The Hanley brothers played on the early-1980s Fall records Grotesque, Slates and Hex Enduction Hour, among many other recordings. Bramah shaped the first Fall album, Live at the Witch Trials, from 1979, with his own mind-bending ideas and guitar. (Music historians might be tempted to wonder how The Fall would have evolved had he not left so early to form The Blue Orchids with Una Baines, the band’s original keyboard player.)

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As participants and observers, they are fascinated by the peaks, troughs and footprints of The Fall’s 40-year history. The Hanleys and Wolstencroft have written excellent books about their experiences. “It was like therapy,” Steve Hanley says about his memoir, The Big Midweek: Life Inside the Fall. “I had not listened to The Fall for years. I could not bring myself to listen to what I had done or what the band had done afterwards. For 10 years Mark had ownership of The Fall to do what he wanted with it. That’s long enough for him, surely. The last five years in The Fall were so bad. But writing the book brought all the good times back. That and £300,000 in therapy has produced the well-rounded individual you see now!”

As the conversation flows over pints of Pedigree and Wainwright – plus some white wine and some soda and limes – Bramah, who exudes the calm decency of a trusted leader, points out that the tracks on House of All’s newly released first album are in alphabetical order. Laughter greets the riposte that tracks one, two and three would suggest they are also in numerical order. Time for a question. Could any other ex-bandmate apart from Bramah have rounded up some of The Fall’s many other former members into a new group?

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“I am not so sure,” Paul Hanley says, “because Martin is a frontman in his own right, with The Blue Orchids, and has been for far longer than he was a member of The Fall.” Bramah breaks in: “It would be hard to get somebody from the mid-period when Mark was definitely in charge. Because I was there at the inception, I know how The Fall morphed into what it became. It gives me some kind of authenticity. But to be honest I can’t think of anyone other than myself.”

As Bramah started The Fall with his young friend Mark Smith in the 1970s, it seems entirely appropriate for him to appear in a post-Smith Fall firmament. “I originally envisaged this project under the heading of Hex/Trials, being a mixture of the musicians and elements of those albums. It seemed like a good idea, a bit audacious. We’ve made a good record.”

The five of them met in a studio that had been booked for three days. Each brought ideas, but it seems Greenway’s riffs and Bramah’s lyric ideas led the way. By the end they had the album’s eight tracks. Did they ever doubt the magic would work when using the studio as a laboratory? “We had doubts but confidence in our abilities,” Bramah says. Steve Hanley adds, “And the two drummers were a bit of a gamble too.”

“I definitely thought this could be terrible,” Paul Hanley says. “Simon hated being part of a two-drummer line-up [in The Fall] with [the band’s long-time member] Karl Burns. Mark always used the idea he had a ‘spare’ drummer. But it worked really well, the two drummers.”

Does studio improvisation lend itself to democracy or dictatorship? Paul defers jokingly to Bramah: “What do you think of that, boss?”

“This is a bit more democratic than The Fall. I am just more of a benign dictator,” the singer says. “We were doing it off the cuff. In that sense it is totally democratic. Pete contributed quite a few riffs, and we worked them into new ideas.”

Did he feel an extra burden with the lyrics, given Smith’s legacy? “I did feel pressure writing, the pressure of expectation. This was new material written for this project. I wanted to be a bit prepared and edit it down. It’s like a puzzle you have to solve, making the words fit. The simplicity of it – you have music you never knew was going to be there, and it suits certain words you have written. The first piece was Magic Sound.”

[ Manchester’s Mark E Smith had music, wit and football in the soul ]

What elements of Fall culture and practice inform House of All? “We are not The Fall, and we don’t sound totally like The Fall, but we are using some Fall principles gathered over the years – a way of working. Mark to me was a great editor. He didn’t come up with the ideas and riffs and tunes. But he decided what to run with and what to drop,” Bramah says. “The working methods are borrowed from an idealised Fall. Our past experiences are heavily laden with The Fall. It’s the repetition and discipline, using those principles in a fresher way.”

Paul Hanley tempers this: “The whole ethos of The Fall wasn’t there. Mark E Smith wasn’t there. And he wouldn’t have approved anyway.”

His brother says: “It’s quite amazing it worked. None of us had been in The Fall for at least 20 years. It was good for Pete to bring that more recent part” – Greenway played for almost a decade with the final iteration of the group, as Smith’s health declined – “but one thing with The Fall and House of All is we don’t overthink it. We never used to talk about music with The Fall. It just happened.”

Bramah adds: “We work quickly and keep everything sparse. Minimalistics. It’s intuition, a commonality of process. The pressure was we didn’t have any material. We hadn’t rehearsed. We hadn’t even met Pete before. We might be making too much of the fact we made it up on the spot – we did spend six days mixing it as well.”

Listening to the album, the warm, thundering rumble of Steve Hanley’s bass is unmistakable on tunes such as Harlequin Duke and Aynebite. On top of this sturdy foundation, Hanley’s brother and Wolstencroft hammer twin drum kits: a four-handed engine of percussion, they are an aural blur of sticks in lockstep and quirky dialogue, operating both in parallel and in sequence.

Greenway’s guitar conjures occasional flashes of the later full Fall sound, such as on the wonderful Turning of the Years, while Bramah plays second guitar (often wah-wah) and a selective overdubbed keyboard that is the result of a pedal effect on his strings. His trademark Blue Orchids voice shifts mode slightly to a more spoken, declarative form: “Have you seen the corpse? Have you seen the body?”

House of All have turned familiar Fall ingredients into something wonderful and new – and they have already recorded their (not-so-difficult) second album. “We recorded the first album last June,” Bramah says. “Then, to facilitate a video documentary, we went back into the studio in January for two days – while we were still talking, hah! – ostensibly to record an EP. We laid down 10 new tracks. It was the same studio, same working methods. I just have to record my vocal.”

The first album’s lyrics include a few Fall-fan triggers, such as a bingo master and breathing life back into a corpse. Some even see Harlequin Duke as a nod to a diamond-patterned jumper sported by the scrawny Smith. But lines such as “A necklace of gouged-out eyes” and “What have you got in the briefcase, parasite?” work both as acts of channelled ventriloquism and as signatures of great House of All output. Beware listeners: forensic nostalgia can make you miss the melody and bombast of an exciting new entity.

“There is a dark humour about some of the words and references,” Bramah says. “Being in The Fall is a life sentence. You can become a hermit like Karl Burns. But you have to live with it. If you are stuck with the label, why not embrace it and have fun?”

House of All is released by Tiny Global Productions; the band’s second album is scheduled for release in January 2024